Nana Okomfohema Oparebea Visits Washington DC

Nana Akua Oparebea was a multi-faceted and powerful priest in her own right. With her
close associations with Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s
party, she was an astute cultural and political innovator. Emmanuel Akyeampong writes that
Nana Oparebea and the Ghana Psychic and Traditional Healing Association were part of
Nkrumah’s “pursuit of the African personality and identity.”145 As Nkrumah’s spiritual
consultant, she also helped to foster his “religious pluralism.” 146 She extended this pluralism
with her transnational cultural coalition with Nana Yao Opare Dinizulu, who was more of an
African spiritual purist, in that he did not mix Akↄm practices with other ritual applications or
dogmas even though he did socially interface with other groups in the spirit of Pan-Africanism.
With Dinizulu, she pioneered an African Diaspora legacy that is far-reaching and influential in
the United States with thousands of priests trained in service to the Akonnedi Shrine deities of
Asuo Gyebi, Adade Kofi and Nana Esi Ketewa. In 1965 they created the first Akan shrine to be
exported across the Atlantic to voluntarily bring the spiritual practice to Africans in the
Americas.